1. Technical Field
The present application relates generally to an improved data processing system and method. More specifically, the present application is directed to a system and method for automatically enforcing change control in operations performed by operational management products.
2. Description of Related Art
As Information Technology (IT) organizations try to streamline their business processes to control costs, many organizations look to the best practices that have been established by the United Kingdom's Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) or other best practices that suggest how processes should be structured and used. ITIL is a framework of best practice approaches intended to facilitate the delivery of high-quality information technology services.
ITIL consists of a series of books giving guidance on the provisioning of quality IT services, and on the accommodation and environmental facilities needed to support IT. ITIL has been developed in recognition of the growing dependency on IT and embodies best practices for IT Service Management. The ethos behind the development of ITIL is the recognition that organizations are becoming increasingly dependent on IT in order to satisfy their corporate aims and meet their business needs. This leads to an increased requirement for high-quality IT services.
A fundamental tenant of best practices, such as set forth in the ITIL, is configuration management, i.e. a process that tracks all of the individual configuration items (CIs) in a system. A configuration management database (CMDB) is used as a unified or federated repository of all of the components, i.e. configuration items, of an information system, and is utilized by the configuration management practice.
The IBM Service Management solution, available from International Business Machines Corporation of Armonk, N.Y., is an implementation of process management that is integrated with the CMDB and operational management products. IBM Service Management provides a comprehensive and scalable solution that can enable deployment, maintenance, and management, of IT resources. The ITIL has been used as a guideline for developing the base processes of the IBM Service Management solution. These base processes can easily be modified by users to match the manner in which they wish to run their business using the IBM Service Management solution.
IBM Service Management includes a change and configuration management database (CCMDB) implementing change management processes with an integrated change management database (CMDB). The CMDB is populated with IT resource configuration information through direct discovery of the configuration information via sensors that collect information from the network and computer systems. Moreover, this IT resource configuration information may be obtained through discovery library adapters that load information into the CMDB from other operational management products (OMPs), such as network management tools, software distribution tools, inventory tools, and storage management tools.
FIG. 1 is an exemplary diagram illustrating an architecture of the IBM Service Management solution. As shown in FIG. 1, the architecture is comprised of a process runtime environment 110, a data subsystem 130, operational management products (OMPs) 140, a set of policies 160, and a set of integrated user interfaces 170. The architecture works in conjunction with IT infrastructure, transactions, users, and business processes 150. The process runtime environment 110 supports a number of process flows 112-118 for providing services in different disciplines including configuration and change management 112, release management 114, availability management 116, and storage management 118.
The data subsystem 130 contains a discovery library 132, a data synchronization and federation engine 134, a reconciliation engine 136 for data cleansing and normalization, and a change management database (CMDB) 138. The CMDB 138 is populated through the techniques described above, i.e. via the discovery library 132 and discovery library adapters provided by the operational management products (OMPs) 140, and the various services or tools provided in the process runtime environment 110. The integrated user interfaces 170 are used to interact with and administer process steps in the process management services 112-118, sometimes launching functions from the salient operational management products (OMPs) 140. The policies 160 are used to guide execution of the process steps based on the severity of the change or other salient attributes as defined by the process developer or administrator.
Individual process steps in the process management services 112-118 may interact with the OMPs 140 via system integration modules (SIMs) 120, e.g., Web service calls that perform a management function through a management product automatically, or through user driven techniques, such as launch in context, to bring up a management product's user interface when a specific operation needs to be done in the context of a process.
A request-for-change (RFC) is an artifact that is used to track and operate on a request to change or adjust one or more resources (configuration items or CIs) of an IT infrastructure 150 and is a central part of the change control process. For example, a RFC may be generated by a user of the IT infrastructure 150, an administrator of the IT infrastructure 150, or the like, to make changes that resolve problems with the IT infrastructure 150. The RFC may specify the changes that are desired in the IT infrastructure 150, e.g., the configuration items (CIs), and records the changes that are necessary to achieve the desired change to the IT infrastructure 150.
For systems that are under change control, i.e. a system in which changes to the infrastructure, or CIs, must first be approved and scheduled by a control authority, the RFC is used by administrators and analysts to determine the impact that the change will have. The administrators and/or analysts may, based on the determined impact to the IT infrastructure 150, approve or disapprove the change. If the administrators and/or analysts approve the change, the administrators and/or analysts may then reference the RFC in the processes that are scheduled to guide the operations that must be performed. Effective change control is important for critical IT systems because outages in business services can often be traced to improper changes in configuration of the IT infrastructure 150, e.g., CIs.
The OMPs 140 are services that may automate tasks to address application or business service operational management challenges. These products help optimize the performance and availability of business-critical applications along with the supporting IT infrastructure 150. The OMPs 140 may further be used to configure specific CIs in the IT infrastructure 150 and monitor their usage.
With particular relevance to the illustrative embodiments of the present invention described hereafter, one or more OMPs 140 may be used to change the configuration of an IT resource, in the IT infrastructure 150, once a human administrator and/or analyst has approved the change to the IT resource, via approval of the corresponding RFC. For resources under strict change control, the subject matter expert that is using the OMP 140 may have to ensure that the change being performed is related to a valid RFC that has been approved by an appropriate human authority, and that the current status of the system is at a correct state for the change to be made, e.g., the change to the IT resource is scheduled to occur at the time that the change is actually being made. If the change is not performed correctly in this manner, then the change management process may fail and outages may occur.
Since RFC checking when working with an OMP is a manual process, it may be subject to mistakes when misunderstandings occur. As a result, inappropriate changes may occur and system outages may occur. In other words, the RFC checking functionality is subject to human error.